Enterprise cloud technologies and consumer video applications bring broad impact on a communications market. As a result, data centers have a strong growth in quantity and continual expansion in new geographic positions. Development of all-optical data centers imposes a stringent requirement on an optical cross-connect apparatus. A scale of an optical cross-connect apparatus must reach at least 100×100 to adapt to access of massive servers. A switching time of the optical cross-connect apparatus must reach up to about 10 μs to 100 μs to satisfy application of packet switching. An insertion loss of the optical cross-connect apparatus must be less than at least 5 dB for deployment in many application scenarios.
At present, optical cross-connect apparatus technologies mainly include a 3-dimensional micro-electro-mechanical system (3D-MEMS) optical cross-connect apparatus, a silicon-based optical cross-connect apparatus, and the like. On one hand, at present, a scale of a 3D-MEMS optical cross-connect apparatus for commercial use may reach up to 320×320, and theoretically may have up to thousands of ports. In addition, the 3D-MEMS optical cross-connect apparatus has superior optical performance. However, the optical cross-connect apparatus has an extremely low switching speed only at a millisecond granularity. This restricts application of the 3D-MEMS optical cross-connect apparatus in a data center. On the other hand, the silicon-based optical cross-connect apparatus has a quite high switching speed. With a carrier injection technique, the silicon-based optical cross-connect apparatus may reach a switching speed at a nanosecond granularity. However, currently, the silicon-based optical cross-connect apparatus has a quite large insertion loss and has a polarization-dependent problem. In addition, a scale of the silicon-based optical cross-connect apparatus is difficult to expand. This also restricts application of the silicon-based optical cross-connect apparatus.